Best of 2016: Non-Fiction Books

Continuing with our series of “Best of 2016″ lists curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as nominations from our readers.

This list brings together some of our favorite non-fiction books, including creative non-fiction, essays, & memoir.

In no particular order:

1. So Sad Today by Melissa Broder (Grand Central Publishing)

“At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder’s popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny.”―Cosmopolitan

2. Proxies by Brian Blanchfield (Nightboat Books)

Into what some are calling a new golden age of creativ nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart. —Maggie Nelson

3. A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam (Canarium)

Suzanne Buffam’s third poetry collection, A Pillow Book, takes the reader into the haze-filled world of the insomniac, turning the half-muddled thoughts of sleepless-ness into irreverent, sharp and meditative poems. — Maisonneuve

4. The Ghosts of Birds by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions)

The brilliant net of details that Weinberger casts and recasts in his various inventive approaches to form is precisely what constitutes a superlative poetic imagination. And it’s what holds the essays—and us—trembling and raging and hallucinating together. —Forrest Gander

5. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing (Picador)

Olivia Laing, in her new book, The Lonely City, picks up the topic of painful urban isolation and sets it down in many smart and oddly consoling places. She makes the topic her own . . . Perhaps the best praise I can give this book is to concur with Ms. Laing’s dedication: ‘If you’re lonely, this one’s for you.’ —Dwight Garner

6. Some Versions of the Ice by Adam Tipps Weinstein (Les Figues Press)

A flourish of secrets underlying cuffs and garden plots and the ice so fast approaching and receding. This is a happy book, sinister undertones reserved for the reader to recognize, if they are there at all. I love information. Uncanny information. The subplot and the reason for versions rather than certainties. Some Versions of the Ice is special, an original. —Fanny Howe

7. Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak (Black Cat)

Raw, poetic, and compulsively readable. In Molly Brodak’s dazzling memoir, Bandit, her eye is so honest, I found myself nodding like I was agreeing with her, sometimes cringing at what she sustained, and laughing—often. I can’t wait to buy a copy for everyone I know. —Kathryn Stockett

8. The Surrender by Scott Esposito (Anomalous Press)

Scott Esposito’s THE SURRENDER is a page-turner, moving and intellectually engaging… THE SURRENDER is not only an essential read for gender studies, but for anyone who must live with doubled identity, and this is many of us: immigrants, refugees, exiles, nomads, translators… —Don Mee Choi

9. Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion edited by Piyali Bhattacharya (Aunt Lute)

Good Girls Marry Doctors is a beautiful testimony to the complexities and complicities of being a good South Asian daughter. Race, gender and immigration aren’t just words – they are ways we live. In these stories – intimate, heart-breaking, funny – you will hear of mothers who tell off the KKK, the oppressive gossip of aunties, and the symbolic resonance that can vibrate from a Vitamix. –Ken Chen

10. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press)

Is there hope for an ethics of memory, or for peace? Nothing Ever Dies reveals that, in our collective memories of conflict, we are still fighting the Forever War. Nguyen’s distinctive voice blends ideas with family history in a way that is original, unique, exciting. A vitally important book. —Maxine Hong Kingston

11. epilogue by Juliet Patterson (Spout Press)

EPILOGUE explores the paradoxes inherent in mourning—its way of demanding privacy but also communion, interiority but also expression—with a stunning and wise lyricism. As Patterson investigates her experience of grief for meaning, her insights surface as moments of intense compassion available to us all.

Both funny and heartbreaking, Diamond’s memoir is not just an account of how one director’s films impacted-and perhaps saved-his life. It is also a memorable reflection on what it means to let go of the past and grow up. A quirkily intelligent memoir of finding oneself in movies. -Kirkus Reviews

13. Visceral Poetics by Eleni Stecopoulos (ON Contemporary Practice)

Eleni Stecopoulos’s brilliantly provocative, syncretic manifesto identifies idiopathic disease with ideolectical poetics, pathology with anomaly—the flesh of the text and the text of the flesh—bringing home the liberatory potential for visceral readings of the unintelligible. For Stecopoulos, diagnosis is a practice of aesthetic translation and poetry a quest for knowledge outside the disabling strictures of Western rationalism. Written in lyric bursts of telegraphic intensity, Stecopoulos follows her guides, Artaud and Metcalf, through veils of suffering in order to repossess, from the jaws of evisceration, her own life—and ours. —Charles Bernstein

14. Diving Makes the Water Deep by Zach Savich (Rescue Press)

This book is radically alive. Visionary, cantankerous, lustful, generously attentive to what Agee called ‘the common objects of our disregard.’ Savich writes, ‘My favorite concept remains the actual, despite everything.’ Why settle for a life circumscribed by recieved notions of right and wrong, when you could instead live in the world, ‘entangle further’? In the tradition of the great poet-teacher treatises before it… DIVING MAKES THE WATER DEEP gifts the reader closer contact with the world by documenting one life’s devotion to art. —Lisa Wells

15. A Bestiary by Lily Hoang (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)

The most perfect use of fragmentation, myth, language, fairytale, and terrible beauty that I have ever seen in my life. I’m swooning. My faith in what writing can be has been restored. -Lidia Yuknavitch

16. Estranger by Erik Anderson (Rescue Press)

Though a hallmark of Erik Anderson’s virtuosity is his allergy to category, we might describe ESTRANGER as itself a catalog of everyday alienations, one organized by bottomless intellect and searing honesty. Anderson is a direct descendant of Thoreau and Herzog, while also extending their inquiry into the realm they didn’t dare: fatherhood and family. A stunning, moving, essential book. —Claire Vaye Watkins

17. The Yesterday Project by Ben Doller & Sandra Doller (Sidebrow)

Experiments with the alchemy of stories take many forms, some exalted and some earthbound. To enter into a pact, however, to be both present and transcendent, to live as we all live, experimentally, and yet commit to the page as the medium and source of energy, is something I’ve never seen like this. Like a complex game, the secrets of a relationship translate across an invisible barrier, combining into a beautiful third voice, the voice of a couple in crisis and reawakening, the book of that voice. -Thalia Field

18. Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (Archipelago)

A child’s view of one of history’s most chilling instances of genocide. . . . ‘I wasn’t only Tutsi,’ [Mukasonga] recalls of the ethnic turmoil that made her a refugee, ‘I was an Inyenzi, one of those cockroaches they’d expelled from the livable part of Rwanda, and perhaps from the human race.’ Such people, she writes later, were ‘fit only to be crushed like cockroaches, with one stomp. But they preferred to watch us die slowly.’ . . . A thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands. -Kirkus Reviews

19. Telling by Zoe Zolbrod (Curbside Splendor Publishing)

Zolbrod shows great courage as she tries to answer difficult and troubling questions about herself and her family, a powerfully rendered struggle that will strike a chord with abuse survivors and their loved ones. —Publishers Weekly

20. Watchfires by Hilary Plum (Rescue Press)

Hilary Plum’s memoir WATCHFIRES is a tender, twisted, darkly vibrant meditation on the war on terror as autoimmune disease. A quiet work of genius, as hopeful in its punishing honesty as it is rueful in its dire beauty, WATCHFIRES warns, remembers, regrets, recovers. Plum can taste our febrile paranoia and writes it inside out. —Roy Scranton

21. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi (Random House)

I guarantee that finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option. . . . Part of this book’s tremendous impact comes from the obvious fact that its author was such a brilliant polymath. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him—passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die—so well. None of it is maudlin. Nothing is exaggerated. As he wrote to a friend: ‘It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough.’ And just important enough to be unmissable. —Janet Maslin, The New York Times

22. The Sky Isn’t Blue by Janice Lee (Civil Coping Mechanisms)

To read Janice Lee’s new book, The Sky Isn’t Blue, is to remember. Not major events or turning points in life, even though she is writing after a huge one in her life, but remembering moments, textures, sounds, pauses. The air that touched my skin once as I walked home. The sound of dust touching glass. How there was blue once above me when I looked up. It makes me remember that my life is about spaces—of things as large as the sky that envelopes me and of the more intimate, like the space that is my body. The book disappeared as it became each second ticking away in my life, reminding me that I will not be able to save it nor will I ever be able to forget. –Chiwan Choi, author of Abductions

23. Discognition by Steven Shaviro (Repeater)

What is consciousness? What is it like to feel pain, or to see the color red? Do robots and computers really think? For that matter, do plants and amoebas think? If we ever meet intelligent aliens, will we be able to understand what they say to us? Philosophers and scientists are still unable to answer questions like these. Perhaps science fiction can help. In Discognition, Steven Shaviro looks at science fiction novels and stories that explore the extreme possibilities of human and alien sentience.

24. Future Sex by Emily Witt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Emily Witt’s book examines how, for those who grew up in the era of the sexual supermarket, the abundance of options can be less an allure than a challenge . . . Witt is a sharp observer of the behavior and the motivations of others, a wry, affectionate portraitist of idealistic people and the increasingly surreal place they belong to . . . Among other things, Future Sex offers a superb account of the absurdities of San Francisco in the first half of this decade, a bouncy castle of a city where the private pleasures of the conquering tech class are construed (and marketed) as social benefits for all. ―Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

25. The Narco-Imaginary: Essays Under the Influence by Ramsey Scott (Ugly Duckling Presse)

With this stellar book, Ramsey Scott catapults into my canon of favorite literary visionaries. He performs political lament in compressed, exquisitely composed sentences, their gnomic austerity buoyed by humor, cynicism, critical edge, and spiky disclosures—his tone smartly poised on the borderline between the raw and the cooked, the elegiac and the confrontational. His heady syntax will thrill any reader hungry for gorgeous complication. Sonorous, libidinous, eloquent, and charmingly digressive, Scott’s the real deal. -Wayne Koestenbaum

26. Franklinstein by Susan Landers (Roof Books)

This verse memoir, prose elegy, and documentary expose will remind some readers of Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, which, we must recall, is also a book of the living. —Tyrone Williams

27. Liar by Rob Roberge (Crown)

I’ve never read a book more intimately devoted to articulating how tenuous our hold on identity is. Identity is made, unmade, remade by chasing memory, and memory is a series of emotional intensities we barely survive. We make up stories of ourselves to bear the weight of our actual lives. We live between those stories and events coming at us like catastrophic meteors. And yet, mercifully and sporadically, love comes. Read Rob Roberge’s memoir, Liar. Because life is what happens between truth and the fictions we make to withstand it. —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Small Backs of Children and The Chronology of Water

28. Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz (Civil Coping Mechanisms)

In Bruja, Wendy C. Ortiz deftly navigates the land of dreams in what she calls a dreamoir. By telling us her dreams, by revealing her most unguarded and vulnerable self, Ortiz is, truly, offering readers the most intimate parts of herself-how she loves, how she wants, how she lives, who she is. Bruja is not just a book-it is an enigma and a wonder and utterly entrancing. -Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist

29. The Spitboy Rule by Michelle Cruz Gonzales (PM Press)

The Spitboy Rule is a compelling and insightful journey into the world of ’90s punk as seen through the eyes of a Xicana drummer who goes by the nickname Todd. Todd stirs the pot by insisting that she plays hardcore punk, not Riot Grrrl music, and inviting males to share the dance floor with women in a respectful way. This drummer never misses a beat. Read it! —Alice Bag, singer for The Bags, author of Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story

30. Communal Nude: Collected Essays by Robert Gluck (Semiotext(e))

Glück’s writing, a paean to the political and social functions of pleasure and delight… —MAKE Literary Magazine

31. Trainwreck by Sady Doyle (Melville House)

A dazzling compendium of iconic feminist figures…The transhistorical connections between women are delightful, and Doyle showcases the breadth and depth of her knowledge as she moves with ease from Tara Reid to Hillary Clinton to Britney Spears to Marie Antoinette…However, where Trainwreck truly illuminates its readers is in its social and psychological reflections about origins of the narrative. —Salon

32. Calamities by Renee Gladman (Wave Books)

Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes. —Eileen Myles

33. I’ll Tell You in Person: Essays by Chloe Caldwell (Emily Books)

In short, ITYIP is the type of book that is tempting to describe as a bible for young women, but which, since it lacks any pomposity or self-seriousness, evades that type of classification. Rather, it feels more like a beautifully written set of field notes, a journal from the front lines of being a young woman, the kind of book that is impossible not to respond to and not to want to press into the hands of all your best friends, the ones that aren’t books. —Nylon

34. How to Survive a Plague by David France (Knopf)

Prepare to have your heart buoyed and broken in this riveting account… In unflinching, brutally honest detail, France traces the lives of the people behind the constellations of aid and advocacy movements and presents their struggles in a way that will have readers stirred by each diagnosis, cheering the efforts to find a cure, and growing frustrated at the political establishments that ignored the terrible tragedy as it unfolded… This highly engaging account is a must-read for anyone interested in epidemiology, civil rights, gay rights, public health, and American history. —Library Journal

35. I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This by Nadja Spiegelman (Riverhead Books)

If the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, so are the sins of the mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers visited upon the daughters. In this first book by Art Spiegelman’s daughter, those sins are cause for a fierce exhumation of the author’s maternal lineage…The greatest success of this poetic, searing memoir lies in its universality. What mother has not hated her child in at least one terrible moment; what daughter has not, for at least one terrible moment, wished her mother dead? … beautiful [and]…compelling. —San Francisco Chronicle

36. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine by Ben Ehrenreich (Penguin Press)

Ben Ehrenreich’s extraordinary new book, The Way to the Spring, chronicles individual Palestinians who live with this existential struggle and, in his words, ‘decline to consent to one’s own eradication, to fight actively or through deceptively simple acts of refusal against powers far stronger than oneself.’ The timing of this particular kind of work could not be better. —The Brooklyn Rail

37. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race edited by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)

A half century ago James Baldwin, the prophet in the American wilderness, delivered The Fire Next Time—as complex a reckoning with race, morality and human nature as we have seen. Jesmyn Ward has pulled together in this collection you now hold the incisive, sage, angry and deeply complex voices of a new generation, responding to many of the same questions that confronted us in 1963. To Baldwin’s call we now have a choral response—one that should be read by every one of us committed to the cause of equality and freedom. —Jelani Cobb

38. The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler (Counterpoint)

Katie Towler’s lovely memoir is beautifully written, keenly observed, and conveys better than any book I’ve read the necessary and even urgent solitude of the writing life. —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams

39. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books)

This heavily researched yet easily readable volume explores the roots and the effects of racism in America. The narrative smoothly weaves throughout history, culminating in the declaration that as much as we’d like it to be, America today is nowhere near the “postracial” country that the media declared following the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The hope here is that by studying and remembering the lessons of history, we may be able to move forward to an equitable society. —Booklist

Blackpentecostal Breath is a work of utter originality anchored by daring synthesis, acrobatic leaps of imagination, and laced throughout with passages of jolting beauty. -Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Best of 2016: Non-Fiction Books was last modified: December 7th, 2016 by Entropy

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